With the essence of blockchain technology so many projects have evolved with their respective specified purpose to meet the market demand in a decentralized & transparent manner. Here one thing is obvious which is the setting up of the new era of decentralization which will progressively knock out the traditional centralized systems. In the realm of internet, online social blogging is one of the key aspect of every individual in the 21st century. Until 2016 we all had been social through traditional centralized means without any tokenized economy. But since 2016 we are part of decentralized social blogging with a tokenized economy, so thanks to steem blockchain and steemit as a flagship dApp on the top of steem blockchain.
Steemit is the first ever decentralized social media platform on the top of Steem blockchain backed with a cryptocurrency called STEEM. And we all are proud steemians for being a part of this ecosystem.
Since 2016, Steem blockchain has gone through many transformations. One of such transformation is the expansion of many dApps on the top of Steem blockchain within its ecosystem. So along with the flagship dApp Steemit, we have many more dApps built on the top of Steem blockchain. All these dApps have their specific purpose in the sub-category within the main category of social blogging. So it must be understood here that the realm of social blogging is not just limited to creating a blog or article and posting them. It is multi-dimensional and it has many sub-categories and Steem blockchain is evolving to fulfill all those sub-categories of social blogging in the form of dApps.
Further the dApps are not just limited to sub-categories of social blogging. The dApps are also serving various use-cases within the Steem ecosystem. So it is obvious that the dApps which are evolving are catering to sub-category of social blogging as well as services to the variety of use-cases.
The notable dApps on the top of steem blockchain apart from Steemit are - Steemstem, Steemhunt, Oracle-d, Minnowbooster, Musing, Fundition, Esteem, Steemonster, Magidice etc and many more.
This article is exclusively for Minnowbooster as a dApp on the top of Steem blockchain. This article is intended to know in details about Minnowbooster and its journey so far within the ecosystem of Steem.
Minnowbooster is a dApp on the top of Steem blockchain and it is a subsidiary project of Buildteam. It is service oriented and offers many services and facilitates many use-cases in Steem ecosystem. Buildteam mainly focuses on creating leading edge side-chain services and custom applications.
As Minnowbooster facilitates many use-cases, it has an economy within this Steem ecosystem and many users within this community can financially benefit themselves by using Minnowbooster. For an author it is a great promotional tool for promoting the content to the trending page. For an investor who has vested his STEEM into SP has a great opportunity to earn passive income. For planktons and minnows who seek to enjoy the rank of dolphins and orcas, it is a perfect way to lease SP and enjoy the status of those ranks as well as to productively engage and enhance the follower base. It can also be used as a tool for those people who wish to automate the claim of steem rewards, who wish to automate comment promotion and also for many other miscellaneous purposes.
A user can login to Minnowbooster.net using Steem account credentials and can perform various operations. While authorizing Minnowbooster, a user can use steemconnect or vessel or steemkeychain and Minnowbooster supports all of them.
So the point is that, the author needs good upvote size to make it to the trending page. So in order to meet this, an author needs a promotional service using which it can buy upvotes and makes it to the trending page. This will not only increase the chances of better visibility but also better engagement from the community & subsequent earning.
In order to facilitate this, Minnowbooster offers "buying of upvotes" and users in this community can buy upvotes by sending bids in the form of either STEEM or SBD along with the url of the post as the "memo" and can make it to the trending page. Minnowbooster is not a bid bot and it votes instantly to all the posts which is 15 mins old and not older than 6 days. Minnowbooster currently is offering 15% ROI to the bid amount for "buying upvotes". It should be noted that this is primarily aimed to offer as a promotional service and not intended to any kind of ROI. However this 15% is kept so as to offset high fluctuation in the price of steem as the post payout matures at 7 days. So in order to absorb the fluctuation of Steem price within these 7 days this 15% ROI is kept. So normally in a bull market the user gets that 15% or even more and in a bear market it may be below than that. So on an average the idea is to make it break-even and it is primarily designed as a promotional tool.
Milaan is a good content creator in Steem community and from time to time he publishes content. But he does not have sufficient SP and he always struggles to reach to the larger audience in this community. Milaan is looking for a promotional tool using which he can promote his post and buy upvotes so that he can make it to the trending page and can have larger visibility in this community which can further help Milaan to have a productive engagement.
Explain how Minnowbooster can help Milaan to promote his post and also explain in detailed steps to "buy upvotes" from Minnowbooster ? Make a comment on this promotional tool.
Milaan after posting his blog, can use the "buying of upvotes" tool of Minnowbooster to push his post up the rank in the trending page. So first Milaan has to go to his wallet section of his steem account and then Milaan has to send either STEEM or SBD as the bid to Minnowbooster to buy upvotes. In the memo section Milaan has to paste the url of his post.
Alternatively Milaan can also go to Minnowbooster.net and use the "Post Booster" where the range of bid is clearly mentioned with minimum and maximum acceptable bid amount, after filling the payment amount it will show the estimated vote value and link of the post has to be put in the relevant field. Then Milaan can simply click on "Pay via steemconnect" to pay the required amount to Minnowbooster and after that the casting of vote shall be done by Minnowbooster and also a memo will be sent to the wallet of Milaan which contains the vote info.
After sending the bids, Minnowbooster sends a return memo regarding the upvote to the post and the post is done by whom is normally mentioned by Minnowbooster. In case of STEEM as bid for "buying upvotes" generally two memos are sent by Minnowbooster. The first memo is about the conversion of STEEM to SBD and the second memo is about the upvote details.
Sample of Minnowbooster's memo in case SBD is used as bid to buy upvotes
Sample of Minnowbooster's memo in case STEEM is used as bid to buy upvotes
It may be noted that Minnowbooster normally pays SBD to the vote seller and the internal mechanism is still designed as SBD for "buying & selling upvotes" and STEEM for "Direct Lease Market".
There are many types of users in this community. Not everyone has that capacity to have huge amount of SP. So not everyone is having that privilege and freedom to make their post to the trending page by using the SP size. So by this promotional tool, the real sense of democracy prevails in Steem community. Because everyone has that opportunity to make their post to the trending page and have larger visibility. At the same time there is a threshold to the minimum standard of the post to use this service of Minnowbooster, so that low quality post is not upvoted to make it to the trending page. Minnowbooster takes care of it with its robust ToS.
With this option one can set the minimum VP to allow votes and can authorize in their user section of Minnowbooster to sell their votes.
Now Minnowbooster has got even an additional option which is known as "personalized vote selling" and the vote seller can promote their link directly and any one can buy vote from the vote seller through the personalized link and the vote seller in this case earn a better revenue than the traditional vote selling option.
Alex is having 12000 SP in his steem account. He is not that active in steem community owing to his busy schedule and other commitments. However he is an enthusiast of Steem and has vested his steem in the form of SP and occasionally he does blogging. He is looking to earn some passive income by exercising his voting power and wants to utilize his SP optimally. He does not want his VP to deplete below 80%. Explain how Minnowbooster's "sell your vote" option can enable Alex to utilize his SP optimally and how his objective can be achieved with this option. Make a comment.
Alex can go to Minnowbooster.net and then login using Steem account credentials. In the user profile, Alex can see the "vote selling" option. Upon clicking it the setting option will appear. In that setting option the vote seller has to enable "sell your vote" and also there is an option whether the vote seller can also allow only white-listed users or to all general category users. The "sell of votes" will also have the option to enable "vote selling for comment promotion". The minimum threshold of the VP can also be set by the seller in the option of "sell your vote when the VP above". The slider ranges from 25% to 99% and one can set the minimum VP as per his choice within this range. Once the VP depletes below that set limit, Minnowbooster will not use until the VP recovers to that level. So Alex can set all these option as per his choice and then click on "Update". Now Alex is good to go and the vote selling for Alex is active now.
The best part of this "vote selling" option of Minnowbooster is that one does not have to delegate(which normally takes 5 days to get it back) to the bot yet can exercise his VP and SP as per his convenience and at any point of time the user can disable this option as per his will. Further the user can earn passive income and the SP and VP can be utilized optimally. As Minnowbooster has robust ToS, it will ensure that the vote sold by the user is not abused and is utilized properly and for standard content. Those who are busy in their regular daily life and have SP can enable this option and can automate their account for vote selling and can earn some income from their idle SP. Ultimately these votes are being utilized to promote the active authors in this community.
With this option also users can make some earning by making use of their SP by delegating to the bot.
Carey is having 2000 SP in his Steem account. He is willing to delegate 1500 SP to a bot and want to earn some revenue on daily basis. Explain how Minnowbooster's "delegate to bot" will help Carey to delegate and also explain in detailed steps how Carey can delegate to Minnowbooster.
Carey can go to Minnowbooster.net and can login by using his Steem account credentials. Upon login Carey can click on "delegate to bot" link which is there on the left margin of the user interface. Then Carey has to put the Steem account username and the amount of Steem Power he wish to delegate to the bot and then can click on "Delegate(with steemconnect)". Then it will navigate through steem connect page to authorize the delegation and once Carey sign in to authorize the delgation, the same will be broadcasted on Steem blockchain. In this way Carey can delegate the SP he desired to delegate to the bot and can earn daily revenue from Minnowbooster.
The best point about this feature is its customizable lease request.
For the Lessee
- The lessee can click on "lease steem power" and then fill up the lease request form by putting all the relevant details like "steem power wanted", "number of weeks", "how many SP per steem per week". Upon filling this. the "Net APR" and "Total STEEM Required" will automatically get filled up. Then the user can click on "lease(with steemconnect)" and proceed to pay the required amount of Steem for the lease request.For the Lessor
- The lessor can click on "Market Requests" and then can click on "fill the offer" from the so many requests showing on the page. It is obvious that the lessor shall look for highest APR from those available requests and then will fill it by authorizing through Steemconnect.Milaan is a plankton category user in steem community and he has 200 SP available now. He wants to enjoy the status of dolphinhood and hence wish to take a lease of 4800 SP for 4 weeks. He is ready to pay 18.2% APR.
Sham is another user who is an Orcas category user in Steem community and he has 55000 SP in his Steem account. He is very keen to earn some liquid Steem by delegating a part of his SP to another Steem user. He is at least looking for an APR of 18%.
Explain how Milaan and Sham can be facilitated by Minnowbooster's DLM tool and how they can achieve their respective objective using this tool. Explain in detailed steps and also make a comment.
Milaan can simply go to Minnowbooster.net and then click on "Lease Steem Power". Milaan can see the form is there to be filled up to put of the request to lease steem power.
(1)The first one is the "Username to delegate to"-here Milaan has to put his Steem account username.
(2)Then "steem power wanted"- here Milaan has to fill 4800 as Milaan wants to lease 4800 SP.
(3)Then Milaan has to fill "4" in the field of "How many weeks" as Milaan wanted to take lease for 4 weeks.
(4)Milaan is ready to pay up to 18.2% APR for this lease and hence can put 219 SP per steem per week and this will exactly show 18.2% APR and total steem required will automatically show up, which Milaan has to pay.
(5)Then Milaan can click on "Lease(with steemconnect)" and pay the required amount of Steem for the lease request. After that Minnowbooster will send a memo about the lease request and it will be listed in the "Market Requests" immediately and anyone can see it and fill it if interested to and Minnowbooster will also notify Milaan once it gets filled up.
Now Sham is having 55000 SP and as he is looking to delegate some SP and wants to earn revenue out of the delegation and as he is interested to do it with around 18% APR.
He can simply go to "Market Requests" and then can see all the open offers and based on the APR, length of lease request and based on the amount of SP he can further fill the offer. Here in this case Sham can see Milaan's request in the DLM page and he is happy to see the APR of 18.2% and he is ready to go & fill the request of Milaan. He has to click on "Fill the offer", then it will navigate to another page with full details and full payment breakdown. Sham can put his steem account username and then can click on "Delegate(with steemconnect)". After authorizing through Steemconnect it will be delegated to Milaan's steem account. Sham will get payment daily from Minnowbooster as per the full payment breakdown.
This tool is really helping both lessee and the lessor to meet at a common place & fulfill their objective and can make use of their resources within steem ecosystem. The best part of DLM market is its "customizable offer" and one is free to make a request of his own choice and affordability and at the same time the delegator will also look for those request which can give better return. Those who are thinking which APR is the most likely APR that the lease request will be filled up - for that, there is also a pie chart displayed in the lease section of Minnowbooster where it clearly shows the trend of filled delegations over the last 7 days. From that, one can at least get a rough idea of the APR and based on that one can put the lease request and that can have the high chances of getting filled.
The lease request remains there in the open offer page for 3 days and if it does not get filled, then at the end of 3 days it is returned to the user and the user can once again put up the request. Some people may ask a question that why the delegator is paid daily where as the lessee paid the sum to Minnowbooster for the full term. The reason is that it is a P2P market and the lessor delegates SP to lessee which is something not controlled by Minnowbooster and at any point of time the lessor can undelegate, that is why in order have better security and safety of the fund of the lessee, the amount is paid to the lessor on daily basis. Minnowbooster's DLM is just a P2P platform where both lessee and lessor can fulfill their objective.
A sample of memo from Minnowbooster in case the lease request is not filled in the DLM
Chris is a regular active steemian in Steem community. He engages with a lot of posts in Steem community on daily basis. He makes healthy engagement and his comments are really adding value to healthy discussions. As Chris believes that his comments are worthy and should remain at the top of the comment section, he is looking for a promotional tool to upvote his comment and make it to the top of the comment section. Explain how Minnowbooster can help Chris to achieve his objective.
Chris can visit Minnowbooster.net and then can login using Steem account credentials and after that Chris should click on "Edit Info" and after clicking on that Chris can enable "Automate Promotion" by sliding it to "green". Chris can also choose the "minimum upvote value" and also Chris can slide the "Top Level Comments only" button, should he wish to do so.
After enabling it, Chris can start getting upvotes to his comments(subject to the availability of balance in the user profile of Chris in Minnowbooster- this can be done by depositing SBD and/or by vote selling) and can make his comment to the top rank in the comment section so that it can be visible to more people and that is what the objective of Chris is. This is how this tool of Minnowbooster can help people like Chris to promote their comments too.
There are other miscellaneous services offered by Minnowbooster using which the users can ease off their daily social activities in Steem community. Those services are as follows:-
Automate claiming of steem rewards
Any Steem user can automate claiming of rewards of his/her Steem account and this can be done by visiting Minnowbooster's user profile and then "Edit Info" and then just by sliding the "Claim Rewards" to green and then by authorizing the bot, one can set the automatic claiming of steem rewards. This is really helpful to all users in Steem community as this is lot better than manual claiming of rewards.
Automate Withdrawal of Balance in Minnowbooster
There are various services in Minnowbooster as described above and any user using those services and being a part of this economy accumulate earnings. These earnings can be withdrawn automatically to Steem account by enabling the "Automatic Withdrawals" button and the user can select the withdrawal currency and also can set the minimum balance so that whenever the balance is greater than or equal to the set minimum balance it will be automatically withdrawn to the steem account.
Email Alerts
This is another tool where a user can put his email and then click on "Email on Mention" so that email will be sent to the user whenever there is a mention about the user in this community. However this facility works only with the premium as of now. The premium means the user has to pay certain amount of STEEM or SBD to Mentionator account to be able to get this alert about the mentions in Steem community. This tool is really helpful, suppose you continuously participate in contests and giveaways or you are in serious productive engagement in this community so whenever someone mentions you in a post you can quickly go over there and check without wasting your time.
Whitelist
The whitelisting works in Minnowbooster only by invitations. So a person to be listed as a whitelisted user must be invited and must receive 5 votes. Further a user can invite two people and can also have 5 vote where he can approve or reject whitelist candidates. Whitelisted users generally have better privileges than the normal category users. So a user should invite best content producer for whitelisting. Also the user should exercise his 5 votes for the best content producer. The best content producers should have that privilege so that they can feel motivated and they can play a passionate role in this community to take it forward. This tool can really help good content producers to be labelled as whitelist users and can further help in building a healthy community.
Check who has resteemed your post
In Steemit you can never be able to see who are the people who have resteemed your post, but you can able to see that in Minnowbooster. Simply log in to Minnowbooster.net and in the user profile you can see "user info", there you can see the "Resteems", just click on that to see how many people and who are the people who have resteemed your posts.
Referred List
There is a reward if you have referred any person to Minnowbooster and when the same user uses the service of Minnowbooster. Say for example someone is referred by you and uses the service of "vote buying " or "vote selling", then you are entitled for a referral reward. You can also see the list of the users who are referred by you. The referral reward is 1.5% of the profit generated by the referral. The user who joins through the referral link also get 0.5% of his own generated profit. So it is a win win case for both.
The term "infrastructure" is really an important term as of now and we all know how this thing got so important after the announcement by Steemit Inc to layoff 70% of its staff and also how it struggled to run and maintain the infrastructure in December 2018. This was really a case to consider and take the lesson so as to remain sustainable and resilient during adverse condition. It is obvious that the market will go through bull to bear phase and again from bear to bull phase. It is all about the cyclic process and transformations and no one notices all these aspect when it is a bull run or when the price of steem is in comfortable range. But things get exposed when the price hits the worst level and that is what exactly we saw in last couple of months. So when the things get tougher and critical, only self sufficient dApps can sustain.
With that being said it is always better for a dApp to have its own infrastructure rather than being dependent upon Steemit Inc. This will not only make the dApp sustainable but also it will restore the true spirit of decentralization. As Steem blockchain has to be there, the respective dApps have to be self sufficient in terms of infrastructure, then only the entire ecosystem will look good and become more decentralized. Nonetheless the dependence upon Steemit Inc infrastructure could lead to the single point failure. So there is a lot of lesson for all the dApps and from now onward at least things should change and in terms of infrastructure the dApps should become independent and self sufficient. That is good for the community and steem blockchain.
Minnowbooster has its own private RPC node from a long time and it continues to run & maintain its own infrastructure and in that sense we can say that it is self sufficient. In an adverse scenario also Minnowbooster will still remain as it is self sufficient.
The idea of decentralization is to empower every individual and helps them grow. The Steem community being a decentralized community also believes in the ethos of decentralization and that is why it is so popular. In order to facilitate content creators to achieve the desired level of visibility of their post the "vote buying" concept was introduced where the primary objective is to use it as a promotional tool and not a ROI kind of thing. But it is obvious that whenever something new is introduced is always vulnerable in the hand of bad actors. So when the vote buying concept was new and in beta stage many bad actors abused this facility & tried as much as they could to exploit this concept and tried to use it as a tool of ROI. Moreover many bad actors tried to promote poor contents, spam contents and plagiarized materials using this promotional tool. This community has zero tolerance to all such things and hence the individual service providers must have a strong framework to deal with such actors in this ecosystem.
Minnowbooster being a responsible dApp in this steem ecosystem has a well defined and robust Terms of Service in place to fight against spam & plagiarism. It sets that filter to filter out those bad actors from using the services of Minnowbooster. The ToS includes all those aspects which is considered as an abuse to Minnowbooster's services and this ToS can be found in their discord channel as well as in their website.
The details of ToS of Minnowbooster-
What constitutes abuse of @Minnowbooster?
- Using multiple accounts to post duplicate content and purchasing MB upvotes for all of them
- Same goes for using multiple accounts to post low quality content just to farm Minnowbooster for profits
- Upvoting posts with MB that are written in a copy / paste style
- Using a MB vote for very short or repetitive content. Length is subjective, but 150 words is a good safe guideline.
- Using the service via automation scripts and bots
- Scraping information from MB website
Photography Post Rules:
- Single photo posts are not allowed
- Photography posts must contain supporting text and show significant effort in terms of production value (location, setup, lighting and subject) to be considered boostable.
Art, Video & Animation Post Rules:
- Posts must be originally produced by the author and contain supporting text.
- Memes are not considered art.
Public Domain Content:
- Sources and Authors used in posts must be correctly cited and linked to original content
Forbidden Topics:
- Violence, self-harm, gore
- Politics & political opinion
- Religion
- NSFW
- Drugs and other illegal substances
- Scams and pyramid schemes
Use discretion in upvoting posts, using a small MB upvote for short content may be okay under some circumstances but think about the content you are upvoting and decide based on the criteria we have laid out.
What is's new policy in dealing with abuse? Users who violate our TOS regarding upvotes will face the following consequences:
1.) Your post will be unvoted by Minnowbooster
2.) You will not receive a refund for the original upvote.
3.) Your account can be blacklisted
This particular heading is really the main theme of this article. It is really important to underline this heading because this is something which is an essential component of Steem ecosystem. If we talk about Steem blockchain then we can understand it as the foundation stone of a decentralized social media which has certain characteristics and features which help people to interact with one another or a business entity in a decentralized environment.
The dApps on the top of Steem blockchain are like the buildings, flats & apartments and each one of these dApps serve a specific purpose and use-cases within this ecosystem. There are many dApps as of now and this dApps ecosystem is expanding at a faster rate in last 5/6 months. When I talk about Minnowbooster then its existence is quite old and it has been offering various services since early 2017. It started with "vote buying" facility and later on extended the service of DLM(Direct lease Market). During the early days, the vote buying was being facilitated by Minnowbooster from its main Minnowbooster account and at that time it was really giving very good ROI. But every use-case takes little time to readjust itself to become best fit for the ecosystem and so was the various services offered by Minnowbooster. So as the demand increased over a period of time, Minnowbooster also expanded various other alternatives to facilitate the "vote buying" tools. So later on "sell your vote to Minnowbooster" was added, through which the individual SP holder could sell their vote via Minnowbooster to the users who are seeking "vote buying" to promote their post. Since then Minnowbooster has been facilitating its service from both Minnowbooster account as well as from "vote seller".
Minnowbooster has been facilitating the p2p service through its portal for the DLM and this is really a very unique and most popular lease market in Steem ecosystem where a lessee and a lessor fulfill their objective. Delegation to a bot is also facilitated by Minnowbooster and it is one of those service out of many offered by it.
Here we must understand that Minnowbooster as a dApp serves a wide variety of use-cases and apart from this when it comes to deliver those use-cases, it handles those with utmost professionalism and at the same time it plays a major role in keeping the community guidelines in the forefront so that the business is always done by keeping that spirit intact. A well written ToS to fight against spam and plagiarism reiterates those commitment by Minnowbooster. It does not stop here. It also plays a better role in terms of social responsibility. From time to time it organizes contests and giveaways where the users of this community participate and then they are rewarded with STEEM. Last but not the least it is self sufficient means it runs its own private RPC node and not dependent upon Steemit Inc infrastructure.
So there has been a constant evolution that has been taking place in Minnowbooster and over a period of time it has added and expanded the ecosystem and played its part for the progressive development of the steem ecosystem. The above is a testimony o the strong evolution of Minnowbooster.
If we look at the comprehensive time line of Minnowbooster and go back to those dates where Minnowbooster officially announced the start of various key services and if we plot those things and check how it was at the start and how it is right now, then one can comfortably say that there been a constant development and upgradation to the services offered by Minnowbooster. Serving a wide variety of use-cases and handling them with utmost professionalism and keeping the community spirit intact, Minnowbooster has always scored above par, when all those services offered by Minnowbooster are evaluated. That is a testimony of strong evaluation of Minnowbooster on the top of Steem blockchain.
The Steem blockchain is growing and expanding and the growing number dApps are a testimony its growth. The ecosystem is also getting vast and diverse. But within this ecosystem we don't just need dApps which pops like mushrooms and one day dies out. What we really want is value driven dApp, which is very professional in delivering its business, which keeps the spirit of decentralization intact within this community, which has a sense of social responsibility within this ecosystem, which is sustainable in the long run, which is self sufficient and which is resilient to adverse conditions.
Minnowbooster has stood the test of time in all these parameters and it is still continuing and scaling new heights with the passage of time. Right from the beginning, its professionalism in terms of various services is really unparallel. One can find 24x7 support from their dedicated discord channel and one can clarify his/her doubts in relation to their services. From time to time they are also upgrading the various use-cases as per the demand and requirement within the ecosystem. That means the back office team is really very active & continuous development is always on, which is a testimony of a progressive & sustainable Minnowbooster.
The resources of individuals within the Steem ecosystem are in ubiquitious flow from one to the other in a decentralized environment and Minnowbooster is facilitating many of such services and use-cases to keep the activity level intact in many ways and most importantly helping to achieve the bigger interest of the community as a whole.
More Information & Resources
(1)https://steemit.com/@minnowbooster
(2)https://www.minnowbooster.net/
(3)https://buildteam.io/
(4)https://discord.gg/S37bYma
All the screenshots and the logos are takes from the Minnowbooster's official website & Minnowbooster's steem account blog page.
If you find this blog to be informative, then please consider an upvote for this post, that will keep me motivated to produce more quality content in future. Thank you so much for reading this article.